Old Memories can Be beautiful new friends

​As we go through life, our brains are always trying to recall the life we've lived in an attempt to make sense of the one we are currently living. When we experience anything new, the brain immediately starts searching for something in our past that resembles our today.

It's our brain's way of wanting us to always feel safe. But sometimes that works against us.

Maybe we encounter a stressful interaction with someone. Our brain finds an ugly and hurtful memory of an engagement with someone in our past. It tries to tell us our current moment is the same thing. It's the brains way of warning us to run from or fight off someone who isn't safe.

We're lucky to have brains that will do that. But it's often at the expense of making us believe our present - and the people in it - are more dangerous and unloving than they really are.

The brain - and our memories - can actually diminish the value of our current moments.

But the brain can do the opposite as well. It can bring surprising beauty to a moment.

I was driving along a rural southwest Virginia backroad last weekend looking for my friends Celia and Meg. I drove past a wide open farm. When I did, I noticed some old farm equipment.

Without thinking about it, I stopped the car - and then backed it up - until I was in front of that equipment.

I got out of the car and walked up and then back along the row of these antique pieces of machinery. As I did, memories of experiences I'd had with similar pieces started flooding my mind.

I grew up on my great grandfather's farm in rural Ohio. Each of these pieces of equipment took me back to a particular place on that farm, to a particular moment or interaction. As my brain was trying to make sense of a new moment in my life, it was using old moments to make the new one truly meaningful.

I felt more than safe in this new moment; I felt deeply loved.

My brain was making sure this place I'd never visited before - a place I never knew existed - felt familiar and warm and inviting.

I'm not always grateful for the way my brain uses my old world to make sense of the world I'm standing in. But in this moment, I felt truly blessed. When your old world comes to life and brings beauty to a moment that wouldn't have been possible without that old world - you know you're standing in the middle of a gift.

You're in the middle of magic.

A miracle.

Here's the thing about our memories. Sometimes the hard ones, the ones that try to rob our current lives of their value, they can talk us into standing still. They can keep us living in fear and afraid to go explore a new world, because we're certain it will look like the old one.

But when we take some chances in life, when we go live a life that's been waiting on us, sometimes our memories become our friends. And they help us make new memories that will see a new life in a hopeful way.

Our memories can become a part of life that send us skyward and not hold us back.

Our memories can make the dead antiques of the past a life-giving promise of today.

And that - that can make you look as forward to tomorrow as you've ever looked.